| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from My Antonia by Willa Cather: the most interesting things we had to think about. Our lives centred
around warmth and food and the return of the men at nightfall.
I used to wonder, when they came in tired from the fields,
their feet numb and their hands cracked and sore, how they could do
all the chores so conscientiously: feed and water and bed the horses,
milk the cows, and look after the pigs. When supper was over,
it took them a long while to get the cold out of their bones.
While grandmother and I washed the dishes and grandfather read
his paper upstairs, Jake and Otto sat on the long bench behind
the stove, `easing' their inside boots, or rubbing mutton tallow
into their cracked hands.
My Antonia |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from A Princess of Parms by Edgar Rice Burroughs: apartment, still followed by her guards.
Thus was the edifice of my brief dream of happiness
dashed, broken, to the ground of reality. The woman for
whom I had offered my life, and from whose lips I had so
recently heard a declaration of love for me, had lightly
forgotten my very existence and smilingly given herself to
the son of her people's most hated enemy.
Although I had heard it with my own ears I could not
believe it. I must search out her apartments and force her
to repeat the cruel truth to me alone before I would be
convinced, and so I deserted my post and hastened through
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne: and untransmitted vigour in Pearl's nature, as this never failing
vivacity of spirits: she had not the disease of sadness, which
almost all children, in these latter days, inherit, with the
scrofula, from the troubles of their ancestors. Perhaps this,
too, was a disease, and but the reflex of the wild energy with
which Hester had fought against her sorrows before Pearl's birth.
It was certainly a
222 THE SCARLET LETTER
The Scarlet Letter |
